When I started writing the book that became Time of Grace in 1996, I really gave little thought to the Easter Rising of 1916 being almost 100 years old. After all, as a child in Dublin in the 1970s, I knew an elderly man in our neighborhood who had fought in WW1! As a child, in fact, I was surrounded by old people who would have been children themselves in 1916, but those events weren’t widely discussed in the circles I was in. (The Rising was followed by the War of Independence and then a terrible civil war, which pitted brother against brother and led to decades of simmering violence in the North by the IRA.)

Fast forward to now, and the Irish people have just officially marked the Easter 1916 centenary (as they call it). Not on the exact historical date that it happened (April 24), but on the day before Easter. The Rising itself began on Easter Monday, 1916, and was actually covertly announced by the planners in the newspaper classifieds—just one of many fascinating tidbits from that time.

My novel Time of Grace takes a mostly objective, though somewhat sympathetic, view of the events of 1916but is mainly concerned with a forbidden love affair between two young women, one Irish, one English, who are caught in the middle of the storm.After originally being published in Ireland 15 years ago,it has enjoyed new life as an ebook on Amazon, and I’m going to mark the occasion of the centennial by lowering the Kindle price to 99 cents for all of April.

Click on the cover image above to take you to the Amazon link.

Happy Easter, everybody. I always find pleasure this time of year in noticing the renewal of spring. This does seem to be a season in which the pagan and the spiritual are overlaid with each other, just as many early Christian churches were built on pagan temples or near sacred springs. It’s a powerful time of resurgence and I think the planners of the Rising must have sensed that. They did in fact succeed in radically changing Ireland, though they couldn’t have anticipated the complexities that followed their actions.